Emotional arousal and task performance.

42 male Ss were exposed to either a hostility inducing or a neutral confederate and then tested on both stereotyped and nonstereotyped forms of a simple lever pressing task. As predicted, emotional arousal (hostility) had no effect on performance of the relatively stereotyped task but led to a considerable though transitory drop in performance after changeover to a nonstereotyped task requiring concentration. This result corroborates in a laboratory setting previous reports of research done in the field. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)